Program Details
Name: Growing Radical
Duration: 2 months
1 session: June 29th - August 21st 2020
Age: 15 to 19
Educators: Home Team
Capacity: 12 – 20 students per session
Location: Place Corps at Hawthorne Valley, Ghent, NY
Postponed in response to COVID-19
WHAT
Growing Radical is Place Corps’ Summer Intensive Gap Program where 15- 19 year olds learn practical skills for radical living on a 900-acre Biodynamic ® Farm in the Hudson Valley. During this summer intensive, you will experience the magic of the Hudson Valley as a living classroom. Come live on a homestead eco-village, engage with hands-on green building projects, be certified in permaculture design, learn to grow and process your own food, wildcraft, create collaboratively, hike the mountains, plus more.
“This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden—so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone.”
Grow Radical with Place Corps!
A Summer to Remember:
- Eco-village/homestead
- Canvas tents, outdoor kitchen/shower
- Practical hands-on, outdoors place-based learning, college credit available
- Farming, making, building, cooking
This residential gap program is for young adults of all skill levels. Using a whole systems, place-based learning approach, residents are challenged to experiment with alternative possibilities of living. Growing Radical residents engage with accomplished practitioners and organizations working at the forefront of social, ecological, and economic regeneration.
During this 2 month program, you will complete a permaculture design certification with the option for further college credit, design and build a project for the homestead, as well as gain confidence and experience in nurturing yourself, community, and the earth through the care of and harvest from a regenerative garden. Emerge from Place Corps with a calling to know, love, and serve the next place in your life!
Each day begins with a farm-fresh breakfast in the outdoor kitchen before moving into the building, permaculture design, or regenerative agriculture lesson of the day. Through hands-on projects and guided experiential intensives, you will develop your technical knowledge and confidence in your ability to design, build, and grow anywhere. Our interdisciplinary approach during our summer program includes workshops, lectures, and field trips with diverse experts in the bio-region.
In addition to our practical hands-on workshops, Growing Radical is centered around place-making through design, research, and experimentation. We deepen our understanding of place through collaborative homestead design projects that consider the lineage of place, permaculture, regenerative agriculture, water and soil science, social soil awareness, and whole systems thinking.
Growing Radical is for everyone who wants practical experience in changemaking, homegrowing, building a sustainable future and living well. Some residents come with experience in farming while others arrive with little experience in regenerative practices, green building, or design, but all of our residents have the desire to create positive change.
Our mission is to cultivate a calling to know, to love, to serve: let’s build a regenerative future together!
So, why take a Gap Term?
Click to learn more!
A Typical Day
Wake up on a homestead set amidst the pastoral fields of Hawthorne Valley’s farm. Take time for your morning practice, such as movement in the practice space, a walk through the woods, reading or journaling before breakfast at 8:30 am. Growing Radical residents receive a shared budget to co-create weekly menu plans supported by our team of educators and supplemented by homegrown foods. An example breakfast could be yogurt from Hawthorne Valley with blueberries you picked on a field trip to a local farm, farm fresh eggs, and a tea blend of locally harvested herbs.
Then into the living classroom by 9 am for the first workshop, typically focusing on more physical hands-on projects like garden work or building. Practice no-till gardening, create a compost, or go on a field trip to source reclaimed wood for your timber-frame building using green methods. You have scheduled unplanned time from 12 - 2 pm to eat lunch, refresh, and recharge before the second workshop of the day— maybe make a trip to the swimming pond. The second workshop is typically a lesson designed to develop a specific skill or deepen our understanding of place; a workshop could look like an experiment in budgeting, designing a successional garden, processing and fermenting harvested plants, or a botanical walk around campus to begin forming personal relationships with plants of the region.
After the second workshop, you independently schedule your time until dinner with your cohort; you can explore the farm, hike to a waterfall, go swimming in the lake, continue developing your projects, work in the ceramics studio, or catch up with friends and family. Dinner could be a salad of greens and veggies grown in your garden, pasta you made during a workshop with tomato sauce you processed that day. After dinner, there may be a Place Corps organized evening activity or event such as a natural dye, book reading, artist talk, movie and discussion, local music, or a yoga class. Fall asleep to the sounds of the Hudson Valley excited for another day.
Sample workshops, presentations & classes:
Solar cyanotypes
Designing a successional garden
Natural dye
Introduction to permaculture
Apothecary making
Canning and food processing
Fermentation workshops
Radical selfcare
Mushrooms for justice
Regenerative landscape design
Sample Weeks 1 & 2
Intensive workshops in permaculture design
Brief led projects: you will develop specific skills while exploring your chosen project for the regenerative homestead
Trips around the Hudson Valley provide inspiration as well as, cultural and historical context
Collaborative group work
See below for more info about Growing Radical:
